Albedo Control as an Effective Strategy to Tackle Global Warming: a Case Study

Doha 2012 Climate Change Conference reminds that the effort to cope with Climate Change has to be increased in order to achieve Kyoto targets. In this context, an innovative methodology (officially recognized by WEC in 2009) has been proposed by CIRIAF to mitigate Global Warming by artificially enhancing Earth’s albedo. Such methodology allows to quantify the maximum environmental benefit achievable through the installation of Albedo Control technologies, as a function of the geographical features of the installation site, local meteorological conditions, radiative properties, tilt angle, and orientation of the surfaces; this benefit is quantified in terms of CO2eq offset. Albedo Control can be an effective mitigation strategy by means of three synergic positive effects: a direct contribution in Global Warming (GW) mitigation produced by the reflection to the outer space of the shortwave incident radiation; the indirect contribution from energy savings in buildings (given by lower energy requirement for cooling); the indirect contribution from the mitigation of UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect. Since the effectiveness of Albedo Control technologies is particularly relevant on Mediterranean area both for climatic conditions and historical‐architectural heritage, this work presents procedures and findings of ABCD (Albedo, Building green, Control of global warming and Desertification) project and its application to a Tunisian case study, funded by the Italian Ministry for the Environment. The project provides the application of the methodology to a Tunisian factory site, showing that among 16.000 tCO2eq could be offset in 30 years with the installation of about 115.000 m2 of high‐reflective surfaces. Finally an allocation of a tradable value (ETS carbon credits) to Albedo Control technologies is proposed.